You are now watching the throne: Samsung Galaxy S III review

A more-than-worthy successor for the Galactic, er, Galaxy Empire.

Ice Cream Sandwich

The Samsung Galaxy S III runs Google's Android 4, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich. We've already run a full review of the OS, and as such won't repeat it here. If you'd like a refresher you can read our full ICS review.Samsung is streaking ahead of its Android competitors recently, thanks largely to its Galaxy line of phones, and particularly the Galaxy S subset of smartphones. The line has produced hit after hit—even the Galaxy Note found its audience.

While our initial Galaxy S III encounter wasn't perfect, it's because the phone reaches in some departments where it's just not ready, like S Voice, or is targeting an outside use case, as with some new sharing features. Still, while it would have been nice for those elements to come perfectly functional, they're non-essential; the core experience of the Galaxy S III is as good as ever.

Compared to the Galaxy S II, the Galaxy S III running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is a big departure from the typical black Android slab we've gotten used to seeing the last couple of years. The body is all rounded-off plastic edges, and while it's a bit slippery, it would be comfortable for us to hold if it weren't quite so wide. Like the Galaxy S II, the Galaxy S III has a flimsy back cover that pops off very easily for access to the battery, SIM card, and microSD slot. The volume rocker and sleep buttons are very low-profile with little depth, though they didn't take much force to press.

We've seen a few reviewers allege that the Galaxy S III feels cheap. But aside from the thin snap-on-snap-off back cover, it feels solid, sleek, and light for its size, compared to the denser iPhone.

Per the new standards for Android 4, the Galaxy S III has only 3 buttons along the bottom of the screen: the hardware home key, a soft menu button on the left, and back button on the right. Samsung notes that officially, Android prefers the two soft buttons to be switched (as they are on the flagship Samsung Galaxy Nexus) but the Galaxy S III's follow the precedent set by the Galaxy S line.

The speaker on the phone is on the back, next to the camera. Even with the volume all the way up, it's quiet, so being directed backward does it no favors.

Screen and camera

The Galaxy S III has a 4.8-inch 1280x720 Super AMOLED display that uses a uses a PenTile (RBGB) pixel layout. PenTile screens haven't done much for us in the past, but this one surprised us with its crisp and even color. Even small text looks good—not perfect, but a noticeable improvement over previous models.

The big downside of the screen is that it's not very bright. Even at full brightness, it's readable but dim outside. Indoors it looks fine, but much below 50 percent brightness it looks lackluster. On the plus side, this does mitigate the bioluminescent glow of Samsung's TouchWiz UI overlay.

Another, lesser downside (depending on your needs) is that the neon glow that radiates from the phone's UI seems to be in part a result of the phone's screen. Colors that are simply bold on other phones look irradiated on the Galaxy S III. Whites used in the UI look white, but whites found in pictures on the Galaxy S III look a bit yellow compared to other phones, even when the Galaxy S III is at full brightness.

The 8-megapixel Galaxy S III camera has a wide-angle lens, on display in the outdoor shot above. The colors are true and the camera takes great pictures indoors. The shot-to-shot time is virtually zero; there is only a tiny animation in the very corner of the screen that shows a picture has been taken. The detail in the photos isn't impeccable, but it's very good.

Internals and performance

Stateside, all versions of the Galaxy S III will have a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, in contrast to the quad-core Exynos processor found in the Galaxy S III abroad. This isn't as bad as it sounds—tests have shown that the Adreno 225 GPU that accompanies the dual-core processor outstrips the one accompanying the Exynos by a couple of frames per second in graphics test. That doesn't make it a clear winner, but the use of a dual-core processor isn't as backward-looking at it might sound at first. Furthermore, the Exynos chipset does not offer the 4G LTE access that we all lust after here in America, while the Snapdragon chipset does.

The processor is accompanied by 2GB of RAM and 16/32GB of storage, which can be supplemented by a microSD card of up to 32GB. Performance-wise, we're glad we were sitting down when we ran Linpack—the Galaxy S III scored around 93MFLOPS in single-threaded processes, and cleared 175MFLOPS easily in multi-threaded ones, sometimes reaching above 190MFLOPS. For comparison, its year-old predecessor, the Galaxy S II, could do 93 and 53 MFLOPS, respectively. This phone is not messing around.

The phone got noticeably warm on the back toward the home button end while running GLBenchmark 2.1.4. It performed better than the Galaxy Nexus in the four tests we ran (Egypt Standard/High, PRO Standard/High) with the lowest score at 29fps on Egypt High and the highest at 58fps on PRO standard.

S Voice and sharing capabilities

Not many of TouchWiz's features are worth highlighting, but S Voice, as Samsung's answer to Apple's Siri, must be addressed. When we first encountered the Galaxy S III at its unveiling, we noted that the service didn't seem to work all that well, but made allowances for the noisy room and pre-production software. Now that we have the final product in our hands, unfortunately, the change of circumstances hasn't improved S Voice much.

Though I personally don't use Siri all that often, its best feature is that I can speak very casually to it without minding my diction, like you usually feel you need to do with computers. With S Voice, unless you've had elocution lessons from a news anchor, it's not going to understand much of what you say. As one example, I asked both phones, "Where is the nearest Price Chopper?" (Price Chopper is a grocery store chain; a brand name, but also two real words). Siri put my query into text: "where is the nearest price chopper" and provided me with a list of addresses. S Voice translated my words into "call Mike at pay cell phone" and gave me a list of phone numbers I might like to call. When the mapping function does work, S Voice offers to complete the query with Maps.

The S Voice app is also very choppy; animations stutter, and the voice trying to communicate with you has very disjointed speech patterns. It's worth noting that Android has had voice integration and commands much longer than Apple has, though they were limited in scope. The attempted expansion to new tasks hasn't really gone over well. We're sure S Voice will improve if Samsung keeps at it, but right now, it's not a selling point.

The other software bit worth highlighting about the Galaxy S III are its sharing features, many of them facilitated by the phone's NFC chip. Users can do things like pull up a photo and tap their phone to another Galaxy S III to beam it to the other handset, or a group of phones can be set up to automatically share pictures with each other as they're being taken over WiFi (for instance, if the group is at a party or concert together). The design of these features is pretty elegant and well thought-out; for example, if you're doing some event-based photo sharing with a bunch of other people but decide you don't want to share pictures or see pictures from a certain stretch of time, you can drop out of the circle and then pop back in later, very easily.

Those features are not 100 percent smooth, and connection issues are usually the problem. But once the phones are connected the way they need to be, everything works quite well. The big drawback, though, is that many of these features require that the phones involved be Galaxy S IIIs, all.

Given that this phone is only just coming out, it's not a great upfront selling point, and given the sprawl of Android devices, all of your friends having this exact model seems unlikely. Then again, Samsung is absolutely dominating the Android smartphone market; maybe its meteoric rise will continue and enough people will have a Galaxy S III for the sharing features to find use. But then, it seems features like these need the capable devices to be near-ubiquitous in order for anyone to remember that they exist at all. Even the Galaxy S II sold many millions of devices globally, and I've yet to see even one in the wild, let alone two to rub together and share photos between.

Battery life

Samsung quotes the US version of the Galaxy S III at around 11.5 hours of battery life talk time on 3G, thanks to its giant 2100mAh battery. Thankfully, Samsung seems to have caught on that a battery that lasts just long enough to get you through the day with normal use is very frustrating on those few days we have to use our phones a lot. The Galaxy S III shines here: we got an easy 7.5 hours of video with the volume all the way up and the screen at half brightness. Unlike the Galaxy Nexus, this phone won't have any trouble getting through the day.

Samsung has another winner on its hands here, a worthy successor to the Galaxy S II we loved so much last year. We'd go so far as to say it puts the Galaxy Nexus to shame in near every measure—screen quality, camera quality, battery life, design, and speed.

The Galaxy S III, which comes in white and a grayish "pebble blue," will be available on every major carrier in the US, including Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular. The phone launches June 21 at $200 with a two-year contract for the 16GB model on all carriers except T-Mobile, which is pricing the phone at $230 (some T-Mobile markets also may not get the phone until June 27). Sprint, Verizon, and US Cellular will offer the 32GB versions for $250.

The Good
* Great battery life
* Nice camera with wide-angle lens, robust sharing capabilities
* Big screen with good level of detail
* Performance-wise, it's whip-fast and powerful
* Solid-feeling body, if a bit large

The Bad
* Back cover is cheapy
* Speaker is quiet, can be difficult to hear outside of tombs and sensory deprivation chambers

The Ugly
* S Voice: this was just not ready for prime time
* The screen is not ugly in terms of being a massive drawback, but its neon tinge is, literally, a bit ugly